Patriot Pyro SATA III Solid State Drive Review

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Introduction and Specifications

Just a few short weeks after the release of its high-end WildFire-branded solid state drives, Patriot is at the ready with a new family of drives, dubbed Pyro. Like the WildFire, the similarly fire lovin’ Pyro is built around SandForce’s sought after SF-2200 series solid state storage processor. But with this newer series of drives, Patriot has paired the controller to less expensive asynchronous NAND flash memory. This pairing results in a much more affordable solid state drive that offers very similar performance to higher-end models with synchronous NAND flash memory in the vast majority of scenarios. There are exceptions, however, which we’ll show you on the pages ahead. For now, take a gander at a fancy product shot taken from the Pyro’s good side and the full specifications below, then we’ll dig in a little deeper and see what makes the new Patriot Pyro tick.

Best-in-class ECC protection for longest data retention and drive life

Power/Performance Balancing

Thermal Threshold Management.

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) - Up to 32 commands

ECC Recovery: Up to 55 bits correctable per 512-byte sector (BCH)

Sequential Read & Write Transfer:

240GB & 120GB models 550MB/s read | 515MB/s Write

60GB model; 520MB/s read | 490MB/s Write.

Max Random Write IOPS:

Up to 85,000 (4K aligned), 240GB & 120GB models

Up to 80,000 (4K aligned), 60GB model

O/S Support: Windows XP / Vista / 7 / Mac OS / Linux

** Capacities stated are unformatted. The total formatted capacity for the drive will differ, depending on the operating system and file system used.

The Patriot Pyro, Inside and Out

The Patriot Pyro conforms to the same 2.5” form factor that is typical of current solid state drives. We should point out that Patriot does not included a 2.5” to 3.5” adapter with the Pyro, however, which is an obvious, but easily forgivable, cost-cutting move.

Inside the Pyro’s hard metal enclose, we find a PCB outfitted with a SandForce SF-2281 storage processor and 16 Micron-made 25nm MLC NAND flash memory chips. As we’ve mentioned, this NAND is of the asynchronous variety, which is more affordable than the synchronous NAND used on some higher-end SandForce-based drives due to its lower performance with some workloads.

The 120GB Pyro you see pictured here features 8 flash chips on each side of its PCB, with a capacity of 8GB a piece, for a total capacity of 128GB. That spare 8GB is provisioned for wear leveling, garbage collection, and other SandForce proprietary features to ensure long-term reliability and more consistent performance.

The 120GB Patriot Pyro is rated for 550MB/s read throughput, with 515MB/s writes, with up to 85,000 (4K aligned) random IOPS, putting the drive on right par with similarly configured SandForce-based offerings on the market currently.